


an ache to action

by heyitsathrowaway



Category: Elemental Logic - Laurie J. Marks
Genre: F/F, Post-Fire Logic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-14
Updated: 2019-07-14
Packaged: 2020-06-28 08:33:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19808608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heyitsathrowaway/pseuds/heyitsathrowaway
Summary: Zanja, sitting up on her knees so that for once she could have even the slightest advantage of height, leaned down to kiss her. Karis tilted her head back for it, and in this too she dallied. Left to her own devices, Zanja was a fast and ferocious kisser, but she allowed Karis to slow her down, to take the time to taste her. It was only a different way to savor, with one of Karis’s broad hands cupping Zanja’s head, the other stroking her back. Zanja’s kiss was never not like being struck by lightning, but it was a tempered strike now, spreading and consuming. Like fire.“We won’t have much privacy either,” Zanja said finally, her hands framing Karis’s face. “We might as well make the most of it.”





	an ache to action

Autumn was breaking quickly into winter, and Meartown was bewildered behind them, but still Karis dallied. She dallied the way she had along the heath, stopping to inspect every little thing. It felt to her as if her skin could not bear to be at rest. Her hands itched to be scratched by the trailing ends of every patch of grass they came across, every stretch of rough bark, every bunch of thistle. Still, after the long weeks that had passed since smoke’s hold over her senses had vanished, even the pain was a joy.

Zanja accepted the slowness of their journey, which should rightly have ended by the time the storm that followed their departure did. But even the rain was delightful to Karis, the only kind of water that did not trouble an earth witch. Rain fell to earth and fed it and became it; that it was water while still in midair did not trouble her. Or perhaps her good mood simply did not allow it to trouble her. And so Zanja trailed behind Karis, who had called Zanja her wife. She still mused on the meaning of that particular word, as if she were not currently inhabiting it, following a madly sensible woman on an aimless journey, and smiling into it.

At midday, they settled by a stream, so that Karis could rest her hands on the sun-soaked rocks beside it and exclaim again over the many delights of cheese. Zanja nodded along, eating her own bread and cheese at a more sedate pace than Karis had managed in a long while. After a time, she leaned against Karis, who happily took her weight. 

“Do you think Medric and Emil will mind the intrusion?” Zanja wondered. “Not that it can be helped, at this point. We certainly can’t return to Meartown.”

Karis shuddered. “Can you imagine the questions the townspeople would have?”

“Or the respect,” Zanja said. “A terrible fate indeed.” She was still smiling when Karis cuffed her gently on the head. “You brought it on yourself, you know.”

“I did,” Karis said peaceably. She ate another bite of bread, savoring. That was the name for how she felt now, she had decided: she was in the mood to savor, to linger. A feeling she had managed to name without Zanja’s help.

Zanja shifted against her, endlessly warm, and Karis reevaluated whether or not this epiphany had dawned on her without aid. “They’ll have no privacy,” Zanja said musingly. “Perhaps they had hoped to wile away the winter in each other’s arms, only ever pausing to fetch another book.”

“A lack of privacy has never seemed to bother them before,” Karis said sourly. Zanja laughed, and smoothed out Karis’s scowl with her thumbs. 

“Did it really bother you so?”

Karis found it difficult to think of that time she spent on the beach while Zanja was captured. Her hectic conversations--if they could be called that--with the water witch had brought her only frustration. He seemed to understand her far better than she understood him. Water was malleable, and earth implacable. Even as opposites, water had the clear advantage. Nevertheless, Karis had soon had her forge, and she had made herself a spike, thinking the whole time not of Mabin, whose heart would hold it, but of Zanja, stranded out on the water where Karis could not reach her.

It had been an intolerable handful of days, and whatever they thought, hearing Medric and Emil on the beach had not improved her mood. “They were trying to make a point,” she said. “And as an earth blood, I of course could not help but understand one made in such a way.” 

“And what point was that?” Zanja had slipped into her lap, moving as swiftly as one of the Otter People. 

Karis put her hand on the sharp curve of Zanja’s hip. “That I could be happy,” she said. That’s not the way Emil would have put it, and certainly not Medric: but they were fire bloods, who lived and breathed intricacy and metaphor. Karis knew the simplicity of the earth, the simplicity of what her skin was telling her. She was happy, despite all the sorrow that had made it possible, and the cause of her happiness was in her hands. “That I could have this.”

Zanja, sitting up on her knees so that for once she could have even the slightest advantage of height, leaned down to kiss her. Karis tilted her head back for it, and in this too she dallied. Left to her own devices, Zanja was a fast and ferocious kisser, but she allowed Karis to slow her down, to take the time to taste her. It was only a different way to savor, with one of Karis’s broad hands cupping Zanja’s head, the other stroking her back. Zanja’s kiss was never not like being struck by lightning, but it was a tempered strike now, spreading and consuming. Like fire.

“We won’t have much privacy either,” Zanja said finally, her hands framing Karis’s face. “We might as well make the most of it.” 

They shed layers quickly, despite the autumn chill, and soon enough Karis had her bare back to the earth, mud and grass, as vital as Zanja above her. She held herself quite still in Karis’s arms, as was her habit. It was a care that Karis sometimes found irritating, but today she was content to run her hands up and down Zanja’s skin, from her thighs to her collarbone, lingering. Karis continued to touch her, shifting against the grass. 

“It’s lucky that doesn’t itch,” Zanja said, her mouth curled.

“It does,” Karis told her. It itched the way Zanja sitting across her thighs itched: an ache to action. 

“We have already discussed the ways in which I am a remarkably impatient woman.”

“Diplomatic as always,” said Karis. “I think you could be patient for me, if you wanted.”

Zanja’s eyes on her burned. “As if I haven’t already?”

Karis drew her down, conceding the point. And then she set about forcing Zanja to once again prove her patience: she touched her all over as they kissed, learning her the way earth witches learned all things. Zanja had a head start in understanding Karis; fire bloods always did. Karis was determined to make up for the time that had been stolen from them. 

Just like the forest around them, Karis could explore Zanja for days. Her skin was rough with scars, except for the places where it was utterly new, regrown at Karis’s touch. Karis’s hands could nearly encompass her ribs, her thumbs nearly touching, and though Zanja squirmed at being held this way, Karis could feel that she liked it. She shivered when Karis touched her breasts, her own hands flexing against her thighs. Caught in a paradox, Karis thought affectionately, and she kissed her everywhere, until even someone as controlled as Zanja could not keep quiet. She pressed her hand between Zanja’s legs and bid her to hold still while Karis took her time.

Karis’s other hand gripped Zanja by the thighs and felt the way she trembled. She couldn’t help it; Zanja na’Tarwein was a crosser of boundaries, and to be dragged deliriously to a threshold and not allowed to step over would be nearly intolerable. 

Zanja, perhaps coming near the end of her patience, bowled Karis back over. She lay above her for a moment, panting, so visibly pulling the pieces of herself back together that Karis relented, and drew a hand through her braids and down her back. Even that made Zanja shudder, her breath warm against Karis’s neck.

“You’re very steadying when you want to be,” Zanja murmured. “And just as disarming when you don’t.”

“Well, it seems only fair. I’ve already armed you.” 

Zanja, just as beautiful and deadly as the knife Karis gave her, bit her affectionately on the jaw. Karis hummed into it until she bit harder. When Karis gasped, Zanja took this as permission to continue, biting a path down from her neck to her breasts to her stomach, leaving bruises that Karis would marvel over for days, like every other sensation. 

Karis was used to being immovable, a woman who could be stone when she wished to. But since the return of sensitivity to her skin, she’d found herself easily overwhelmed to the point where she could no longer control her movements, a prospect that was at turns terrifying and exhilarating. She gripped at Karis’s hair without quite meaning to, and spoke with the same urgency, in her smoke-rough voice that seemed to Zanja’s ears to be as sweet as birdsong. 

There was a smile lurking in the way Zanja kissed her in response, down to her thighs and then between them. It grew even more self satisfied when Karis had to yank her hands away from Zanja’s hair, digging them into the grass instead, wary of hurting her. Zanja pressed her open, and did not try to still her hips, and took Karis over the boundary. She did not even pause, and Karis bit the inside of her own forearm, feeling both sensations as impossibly bright behind her eyelids. In the years in which she’d felt nothing, Karis had not even thought to dream of what she’d lost. It was a shaky kind of knowledge, a teetering fullness in her heart, to know that love could feel this way.

She continued to shudder pleasantly once Zanja decided she was done with her. Karis gathered her up in her arms, and this time when she gripped Zanja’s thigh, it was to drag her forward, encouraging her to rock against Karis’s hand until her patience was finally rewarded.

Sweaty and sprawled out against her, Zanja’s slight weight did not quite feel like enough after such an overwhelming interlude. Karis pressed a hand to a bruise over her collar, feeling the exquisite bloom of pain it left in its wake. She curled her toes against the grass, and dragged Zanja closer, until Karis could do nothing but feel her every breath.

Eventually, they arrived at the house in disarray. Medric, opening the door in a similar state, beamed at them. “You’re late,” he said, and his laughter at the look Zanja levelled at him then could not be quelled until Emil came to the door also, to welcome his family in for the winter.


End file.
